Googie and John: Joanna McCallum on her Ealing Parents

“I’m very lucky, aren’t I, to have these films to watch and to see my parents up there when they were young?”

– Joanna McCallum, actress and daughter of Googie Withers and John McCallum

The stars of It Always Rains on Sunday, Googie Withers and John McCallum, were among the most gifted and distinctive of Ealing’s large company of actors. The pair had met and fallen in love on the set of the appropriately-titled The Loves of Joanna Godden, released early in 1947, and thanks to its success they were again cast together as leads in Robert Hamer’s melodrama.

As it turned out, these were the only two films John McCallum would make for Ealing (although he would go on to work with Hamer again in 1952’s The Long Memory). Googie Withers, though, arguably did her best work at the Studio, playing a succession of strong, independent-minded and often rough-edged women in six Ealing films, including the classic horror Dead of Night (1945) and period melodrama Pink String and Ceiling Wax (1945).

In this film we talk to actress Joanna McCallum about her parents’ experiences of working at Ealing Studios, and in particular, their memories of making It Always Rains on Sunday.

Extracts from It Always Rains on Sunday courtesy of Studiocanal.

BFI Screenonline links

Screenonline is our online encyclopaedia of British film and television, featuring hundreds of hours of film and television clips from the vast collections of the BFI National Archive.

• It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
• The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947)
• Googie Withers
• Robert Hamer
• Douglas Slocombe